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Camille A Brown Dance Company

I don't think I've ever seen a contemporary dance performance entirely by Black women before. That's not entirely true. I've seen duets, and I've seen pieces that were performed as part of a larger evening. But five Black women dancing, and that's the night? I don't think so.

I was in a very bad mood when I saw this. I felt hot and uncomfortable. And the was a group of people who seemed to be unwrapping an entire fucking candy store as soon as the lights went down.

But I loved it anyway.

The movement vocabulary was drawn from pay ground games, from imitating 90s music videos, from that period starting when you're 12 and you keep moving your buddy around to see what it can do now.

There were parts with people trying on being sexy, parts where they were pushing each other to move with intricacy and complexity, and parts that were just about moving in unison, being together.

There was a middle section that gave me flashbacks to middle school and that time my friendship with a girl totally fell apart and I didn't know why and I couldn't make it better.

The music was interesting, somewhere on the border of art music and prog rock. It occasionally quoted pop music, but it wasn't pop music at all. The musicians danced heavy with their feet and we sometimes part of the score.

The part of the staging I found most interesting was the mirrors mounted at angles high above the stage, almost in the lights.

The dancers didn't interact with them, and they weren't really angled for the audience to see a lot in them. It made me think about CCTV and how everything we do is hypervisible, but I don't know if that was intended.

I couldn't get off my ass this morning, it just took forever to get out of the bathroom, get dressed (even though what I was wearing was already laid out), and get out the door. So I missed the 7 am bus, even though there were two of them (6:45 bus was late again.)

Then the 7:20 bus didn't arrive until almost 7:40, and there was traffic getting into DC, so we were 20 minutes late on that end, and, therefore, despite waking up at 6:30, I didn't get to my office until just after 9. D: And since I had gotten up at 6:30, I was dressed in my gym clothes, with the expectation that I would bike half an hour, shower, and dress in work clothes, which got cut to just dressing in work clothes, so I felt vaguely grimy all day.

I made oatmeal for breakfast at work, but I ate it cold and it just felt crappy to eat, even though it had peanutbutter and banana, which I normally like a lot.

I couldn't get my act together to actually accomplish much until the very end of the day, when I wrote 3 pages of notes for Christine about how much she sucks. D: (She doesn't actually suck, they just don't know everything for their job yet, but it felt like what I was doing.)

And I ended up leaving work later than I wanted to, about 5:50. D:

But I went to Whole Foods and had ramen (double vegetables, double pork belly) and macaroni and cheese for dinner, then I went to the Kennedy Center and watched Danish Dance Theater perform Black Diamond.

It was a really beautiful piece, very stylized, and it had a lot of things I like: echoing between performers, callbacks to earlier in the piece, a dude being lifted repeatedly, performers making sound with their bodies, both fluid and staccato movement, and choreography that very clearly and playfully interacts with the music. Some things I am less wild about, too: movement suggestive of hip hop but not performed with hip hop skills, which I find really annoying. Either foot the bill for a dance master to come teach you guys about sharpness and power strikes and fucking actual synchronicity (why do contemporary dancers not want to actually make the same movements at the same time? Forever I'm seeing people choose different angles, different scope of movement, different force, different quality of movement when two people have clearly been given the same movement to perform) or GTFO. Also, the slightly gendered costume and breaking the corps up into gendered groups in a piece which is not actually about gender and seems to speak more to our relationship with technology and the mediated world than our romantic or familial relationships. By slightly gendered costume, I mean things like putting the women in fitted bandeau tops and the men without shirts, but everyone is wearing a great coat and dancers of both apparent sexes are wearing skirts or pants. Like, we actually could have put everyone in fitted bandeau tops?

Also, it did this thing at the end which I think was supposed to be uplifting, but actually struck me as deeply fucky creeping. ( sexual assault-ish )

That said, though, I really enjoyed Black Diamond and would recommend going to see it!

Also, while I was faffing around at work, I signed up for holly_polly! And I've made a journal entry for the first time in a while.

So, it started bad and ended well.

P.S. How do I not have a dance icon?

The Washington Ballet is going to present Rock and Roll at Sydney Harman Hall this February. Tickets are between $20 and $87. Anyone interested in going with me? Probably aiming for the matinee on the 19th, but I could do an evening during the week.

I saw High Lonesome (one of three pieces) this fall at VelocityDC and it was excellent. This is modern dance, not ballet, if that makes a difference to you.

We could make an evening of it, probably, with dinner at Jaleo (or crepes from the crepes place at Gallery Place, as you like.)